Divided #1 – Preparations
Donald Trump becoming the 45th US President surprised us as much as anybody else. His election was proof of a divide in the American society, and ever since then it seems that this gap has ever been widening. Many analysis and reports have been written about this, but we were interested to find out ourselves what is happening in the States, to meet Americans from all walks of life and to talk with them about their country. So we decided to do a one hundred days road trip through the US.
We arrived in New York on the 10th of April. It had been a great relief to be finally sitting in our plane to JFK. The list of tasks that had to be done before our departure seemed to be endless at times. But in the end, we had our journalist visas, Elias had the permission to be out of Kindergarten until August, many bags had been packed and we were on our way.
A few weeks before our departure, we had bought a Mercedes Sprinter van in Maryland. It was our friend Rob’s idea to buy such a car and to transform it into a production/camper van. And if there was one person who could do that, it was Rob. As unreliable as he is in answering his e-mails (particularly if they are longer than 2 sentences) as brilliant he is if it comes to a task like this. We met him right away on our first morning in Brooklyn to discuss how the car should look like in the end. Ideas we had enough, but time not really… we were aiming to be on the road no later than April 22nd. The first task was installing a power system to make our car completely power independent, including a solar system on the roof. It turned out that our schedule was rather ambitious to get all the part we needed in time. So on Friday Mathias ended up driving to a warehouse in New Jersey that was the logistic center for a brand that only was shipping online orders – which would have taken too long or would have cost us $450 for express shipping. After considerable begging they agreed to sell the solar panels and batteries directly to Mathias from their warehouse.
Rob also installed 4 heavy duty drawers in the back of the van, for our equipment and a platform on top of them to host our bed. Thank God, none of us is tall: The bed is 175 cm long and 160 cm wide. It perfectly fits for the 3 of us.
Of course the van wasn’t finished by the 22nd. But not only the van wasn’t quite ready. Preparing the trip was a major task. Amazon became our best friend and after ordering about a thousand things and getting ready for what felt like an eternity, our Mercedes Sprinter was finally all packed up and good to go on the 24th. We left Brooklyn around Noon, and while Mathias was getting used to driving a big van in an even bigger city, Monika was enjoying the brilliant view from the Williamsburg bridge and Elias, after all the excitement, was complaining for the first time that he was bored.
